Feel the Squeeze

I've been putting on socks with general success for 42 years, and the Recovery Sox are the first I've run across that require instructions. A small tag tells me to gather the sock at my heel before pulling it up to my knee. Turns out I needed the guidance, as getting these skin-tight knee-highs over my calves was like forcing a snake to swallow a raccoon.

I'd just finished a six-mile tempo run and was facing a long flight with my three young children that would culminate in a Thanksgiving meal with my parents. So I needed all the support I could get, not to mention, to quote the Recovery Sox package, "an upward flow through the lower legs helping to get unoxygenated blood out and replace it with fresh oxygenated blood." Because the last thing you need if you must face down your mother's noodle kugel after three hours in economy class is a leg-full of unoxygenated blood. Sure enough, they were quite comfortable, even comforting; squeezy, if I may coin a word.

Compression socks were created to help diabetics improve their circulation, and now they've become popular with runners and triathletes looking to boost blood flow and run faster. Eager to enjoy these benefits myself, I wore the Recovery Sox and a competing product, Oxysox, for both training and recovery. The Oxysox have a suppler, more tightly woven Lycra, making them easier to get on and giving them a grippier feel through the ankles, while Recovery Sox hold more firmly to the upper calf. With a bicolor pattern on their feet, the Oxysox also look slightly hipper, though that is a relative term in this context, as you'll learn if your wife finds you walking around in underwear and black knee socks.

I enjoyed running in them, as long as I didn't get too warm, which made them itch. I tried to corroborate a few scientific studies that suggest compression socks can aid running performance. But without being able to eliminate any other variable—the weather, my mood, how much food I ate off my kids' plates the night before—I couldn't establish whether they helped or hurt. Nonetheless, I have become addicted to wearing them postrun until preslumber. I've ridden the train and sat at my desk and, yes, performed my radio show with my calves in a warm, private embrace. On the outside a mild mannered radio host, but secretly: Jennifer Beals in polyester leg warmers.

Why? Because squeezy is good. That's why some runners enjoy wearing tights and a few even put them on in early September. Compression technology may just give us an easy excuse to enjoy the pleasing massage of what are, in fact, support hose, while shielding us from the uncomfortable connotations of being infirm or elderly by a few paragraphs of scientific-sounding performance claims. In the end, who cares what these socks are called—they're cozy and they make you feel happier to have legs.

Peter Sagal is a 3:20 marathoner and the host of NPR's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!

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